Iran-Israel conflict: A difficult tightrope walk for India

Jayanta Roy Chowdhury
Mumbai, FPJ

Global fears of an escalation in the ongoing confrontation in the Middle East between Israel and Iran have come true over the weekend. The Israeli Air Force struck once again on Saturday at Iranian military sites, while taking care not to cross the critical threshold of attacking energy and nuclear assets that the Islamic republic straddling the Persian Gulf has indicated are its red lines. Tehran can of course be counted upon to retaliate even though military analysts seem to believe that Israel’s attacks have degraded Iran’s ability to strike back. The fact is that the ‘nature of the beast’ is such that both the Israelites and the Persians can and will not back down in the face of adversity till the bitter end or till a larger power brings them to heel. This tit-for-tat war has been going on for several months now and the immediate impact of this war’s escalation over the weekend, for the rest of the world will be yet another spike in crude oil prices and a rise in shipping and maritime premiums.

Which in turn mean the costs of imports and exports will keep mounting as will inflationary pressures. With India’s main markets being in the US, Europe and in the Gulf, its ability to earn hard currency from its foreign trade will obviously be affected. As it is, in the financial year gone by, India’s merchandise exports to the global market contracted marginally by over 3% to US $431 billion. This trend can be expected to accelerate and not lessen as we pick up the pieces after the two nations inflict more damage on each other and in the region by way of more savage missile or proxy attacks. However the big takeaway for India from the Iran-Israel conflict will be the political fall-out of the war in Gulf. Balancing between the two “friends and allies” for New Delhi will be a tough task quite akin to walking the proverbial tightrope, and possibly a thankless one.

India has been growing closer to Israel since economic and diplomatic liberalisation began in the 1990s, when Jerusalem and India exchanged ambassadors for the first time. The process has accelerated whenever a BJP-led government has come to power at the centre. Arms purchases, intelligence sharing and coproduction of defence equipment have followed, not to speak of manifold business and technological ties. The obvious admiration of the ruling BJP party and its ideological parent, the RSS, for Israel’s policies has only helped strengthen this friendship way beyond the needs of the two nations to be be close to each other.

However, on the other hand, geography has meant India and Iran have also had to draw closer to each other than in the past. Indo-Iranian relations have come a long way from when the Shah of Iran helped Pakistan in the 1971 war with arms and oil supplies and sent warnings to India that he would “not tolerate any attempt to liquidate Pakistan … (or allow) a new Vietnam on the frontier of Iran” to be created, an euphemism for India helping Baloch rebels or invading West Pakistan. The fall of the Shah and the rise of a Pakistan-supported Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, besides attacks on Shias within Pakistan saw the post-Shah regime in Tehran build new ties with New Delhi.

Through the last quarter of a century, the development of the Chabahar port as a transshipment point for trade with Central Asia and Afghanistan, oil imports by India and an expanding trade with Tehran has meant that the friendship has gone beyond Chanakya’s dictum that a neighbour’s neighbour must necessarily be Magadha’s friend. Iranians have recently reported that in the April-October 2024 period, transshipments through the Sarakhs border crossing, the main route to Central Asia, has risen by 184 per cent, year-on-year. A part of this trade in transshipments originated from India’s west coast, with India’s interests in Chabahar lending a helping hand. In more recent times, Iran’s engagement with India in the BRICS organisation and shedding of its image as a hard line state within the Gulf region has also meant its importance to India has been increasing.

As the conflict with Israel depended, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi launched a campaign of wooing other regional capitals including those with whom Iran has had long adversarial relations. This included personal visits to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait over the last three weeks. The move is obviously designed to counter Israel. However, it also one which makes Iran, long a pariah because of its estrangement with the US and the West and pursuit of nuclear weapons, as also its many conflicts with the Saudis, smaller Gulf emirates and Iraq, far more acceptable to many more nations. As is well known Tehran has engaged with many of these countries in the past in proxy wars.

To swallow its feelings and reach out to them itself shows how serious it is about forging a unity of sorts which could have far reaching geopolitical consequences for the region in the years to come. Diplomatically as well as for sheer economic and technological gains, India cannot afford to lose its friendship with either of the two warring parties. And yet being friends with both will become an increasingly difficult task as each lashes out at the other.

The conflict between Israel and Iran has now gone way beyond a battle of proxies or ideologies, waged in the shadows as it was in yesteryears. It is increasingly an existential war, where both sides are inflicting damage to the other in a manner which their people will resent. The fact that the US, for long the world’s policeman, is going through a long drawn out election with a lame duck President heading it, means its ability to bring peace or subdue the war by reigning in one or both parties is limited. The war between the two theocratic though democratic states, therefore, will continue to disturb world peace for a long time to come. India’s fallback policy of being an interested neutral will under the circumstances come under close scrutiny.

One way out would be to go forth and try to be an honest broker between the two sides. But then the peacemaker unless he or she has the muscle to back up its demands, can often get shot at. The only issue that can be clearly seen in the crystal glass of the future is that India’s ‘Chanakya Niti’ will be severely strained in satisfying both the Persians and the descendants of Jacob as it walks the tightrope between them either as a neutral or as a harbinger of peace.